


Under Stars

by MiaCooper



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Episode: s02e25 Resolutions, Episode: s03e15 Coda, Episode: s03e26 Scorpion, Episode: s04e08 Year of Hell, Episode: s05e06 Timeless, Episode: s07e11 Shattered, F/M, Five Times, canon consistent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-27 03:51:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18296276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiaCooper/pseuds/MiaCooper
Summary: Five times Janeway and Chakotay definitely did it, and one time they didn’t.





	1. Resolutions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arcadia75](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcadia75/gifts).



> Facts, and nobody will ever convince me otherwise, and now I can cross this one off my [bingo board](https://arcadia1995.tumblr.com/post/172898191499/jc-fanfic-tropes).

It would have been impossible to resist him for much longer, even without the love story. Even without the hand-built bathtub and the headboards and the cooking.  
  
Because for months now she’s been trying not to notice the dimples, the sliding glances and the quiet devotion. Trying, and obviously failing.  
  
In the end, she reaches for his hand and links their fingers, and that’s the point of no return.  
  
His breathing is soft and even, tickling the back of her neck, his arm warm and heavy around her waist. And fatigue tugs at her, too – the well-earned exhaustion of a hard day’s physical work, not to mention prolonged and athletic lovemaking – but Kathryn can’t sleep.  The captain’s conscience, it seems, is never fully at rest.  
  
She eases out from under Chakotay’s arm, pulls on a robe and tiptoes outside. There’s the stump of a fallen tree just at the edge of the clearing; she sits here often with her morning coffee, with a book, sometimes with plans for the garden.  
  
Tonight, she sits under the stars, and tells them goodbye.


	2. Coda

His hands shape the outlines of her flesh, cool in the holographic lake air, and she tastes champagne and salt tears from his lips. _He needs this_ , she tells herself as she opens to him and winds her fingers into his hair.  
  
And in this moment, she’s honest enough to admit that she needs it, too.  
  
They have both struggled terribly with the abrupt and necessary end of the relationship they’d barely begun on New Earth. They’ve each had to bolster the other’s resolve. But now, tonight, they’re both aching and raw, and this is the only thing they have to give one another.  
  
He’s shaking and she’s crying, and the stars are blurred points of light far above her in a velvet sky, and she knows that this has to be a moment out of time. Only a moment, fleeting and precious as a breath.  
  
So she holds him close and concentrates on the feel of him within and around her, storing the memory for some faraway day when she can recall it with fondness, and maybe, just maybe, it won’t hurt so much.


	3. Scorpion

She claims to have forgiven him, but he’s no fool: he knows full well she’s still angry. Far from skulking around like a whipped dog, though, his shoulders are straight, his chin high, his mouth firm.  
  
This is their first real test of wills, and he’s not backing down.  
  
The ship is in terrible shape. Kathryn hasn’t slept more than snatches at a time, has crawled through kilometres of Jeffries tubes. Chakotay brings damage reports to her quarters and she ignores the sandwich he places beside her.  
  
The words on the padd blur and she closes her eyes, just for a moment, and the next thing she’s aware of is a feeling of weightlessness, of warmth and security, and as he lays her down on her bed, she presses her face into the crook of his neck and tightens her arms around him.  
  
And he tries to pull back but she kisses him and begs him to stay, and she doesn’t even qualify it with _just for tonight_.  
  
By morning, lying wakeful under the cold light of the stars through her viewport, she’s no longer angry with him. But she’s furious with herself.


	4. Year of Hell

She shouldn’t be surprised that he remembers her birthday or that he’s been saving up for it, planning the perfect gift. Knowing him, he doesn’t even have an ulterior motive. Even after the way she’s treated him over the past few months, since the Borg.  
  
Since she seduced him and then cold-shouldered him without explanation or apology.  
  
And she should have known he wouldn’t let her get away with barking at him to recycle the watch, or with retreating alone to her devastated quarters to stare moodily at the stars through her viewport.  
  
He sits silently beside her and takes her hand, and she turns into his embrace, feeling his lips press to her shorn hair, her temple, her cheek. And then brushing her own lips, which open to him, trembling, as he cups her face like something precious.  
  
She lets him take the lead. He peels away her uniform, traces the sharp jut of collarbones and ribs with his tongue, spreads her open and holds her to his mouth until she cries out, half in anguish, half exaltation.  
  
When he moves up to kiss her, she wraps herself around him and swears him silent promises she knows she can’t keep.


	5. Timeless

Patience has never been her strong suit, and Kathryn Janeway has been known to bet against the house more than once.  
  
If she were thinking straight, she’d reflect that seducing Chakotay into backing up her plan doesn’t increase its chance of success … but then, she isn’t thinking straight tonight. Not with the Alpha quadrant stars in her eyes, so close she can almost touch them.  
  
She touches him instead, lavishly, as he lays her out on the table – _dessert_ , she’d said, a proposition so blatant he had almost laughed – and consumes her whole, like a starving man. He sucks her nipples like cherries, laps at her skin like cream, and she pulls him into her, fierce with the knowledge that this could be their last supper.  
  
There’s something desperate in the way they grasp and grind at each other. Her nails bite into his back; he clutches her hips; she gasps, and he groans into her mouth. And as he spirals her expertly into a place where all she can see is stars, she bites down on the words that want to spill forth. Because even Kathryn Janeway knows better than to go all in on a bluff.


	6. Shattered

The fractures between them have widened, been patched over and cracked open again, and some nights, Kathryn wonders if what they were has worn so thin that there’s nothing left.  
  
Then he shows up for dinner with Antarian cider, and he’s flirting with her, and it’s _different_ , because she’s always been the flirty one, but now he’s confident, sensual in a way he has never been with her before. And she can’t help but respond.  
  
He’s teasing her, doling out little hints about the temporal prime directive, and it’s almost as maddening as the way his thigh brushes hers as he pours another glass, or the way his fingers drift over her nape as he stretches his arm across the back of the couch. And, maddened, she flirts back, moistening her lower lip with her tongue, curving her body nearer to his, lowering her voice to that husky drawl that always makes him shiver.  
  
Only not this time.  
  
Because when the bottle is empty, he rises from the couch and clears the dirty glasses away, and with a brief, friendly clasp of her shoulder and a _good night, Captain_ , he leaves her alone.  
  
Alone with the stars, and wanting, and wishing so many, many things could be different.


End file.
